Rebibbia, 14 November 1981
Cher David,
At this point the prehistory comes to an end. I could recount to you, in the manner of the Freemasons, how it happened that I entered into the universe of wisdom! But I’m sure that your concern for that kind of wisdom is as scant as mine is ironic, so there is no point in constructing here aphorisms à la Lessing. However, I do have the ingredients of my didactic ‘trip’ to hand, and I can spell them out. My peregrinations during those years, in the Neckar valley and the Black Forest, were a journey through the seventeenth century and the romantics – Tübingen, Freiburg, followed by Heidelberg, Hanover, Munich and Frankfurt. 1957–1958–1959. A rediscovery of the homelands of German philosophy, after the Parisian elegance of the preceding years. In retrospect, I realise that I was, however, missing a ‘stove’ around which my animal spirits could warm themselves and make room for the phantasms of theoretical imagination. Indeed the physical sensations were minimal: a Rosicrucian degree of chastity – what remains most solidly from that period is the cold and the fact that you needed woollen gloves to read in the library . . . But, as I say, at this point prehistory comes to an end. A big blast of brass and massed voices, like at the end of the Magic Flute – that amazing ‘beat’ spectacle.
Around this time I got my hands on copies of Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein and the Dialektik der Aufklärung. And there began a headlong descent into the forerunners of those works, a reordering of the ad hoc library that I had been building in the preceding years. On the one hand, the Hegelian thread – here Marcuse’s book on Hegel’s ontology was a happy discovery; on the other, readings from Heidegger, and the laborious but extremely productive reconstruction of the philosophy of crisis in the first three decades of the twentieth century – and an understanding of critical, material and present being (which is a form of liberation from the last Platonic mystifications of philosophical thought). I was discovering the centrality of the problem of the meaning of being. ‘“It’s clear that you have long been familiar with what you mean when you use the term existent; we too hope that we shall understand it one day, but for now we have fallen into perplexity.” . . . It is therefore necessary to re-examine the problem of the meaning of being.’1 This passage, entirely Heideggerian, was central to that German philosophical world. To identify this whole line of thought, it’s worth quoting Rosenzweig (and it is clear that irrationalism has absolutely no place here): ‘Schopenhauer was the first among the great thinkers to be concerned, not with the essence, but with the value of the world.’2 So this was the order and the direction of my philosophical readings. Husserl and Wittgenstein, under the spotlight; a set of lights and shadows. And then, consequently and in parallel, a reordering of the basics of sociology and of critical reflection on history (as the history of capitalism): from von List to the academic socialists, from Max Weber to Simmel to the Frankfurt School. The fine progressive humanism in which I found myself involved did not give much account of itself in this new temple. As I advanced, the progressive tendency, typical of the culture of the Italian left, turned out to be literary and rhetorical when it intersected with a systematic approach to the world – as capitalist relations, as the being of alienation. Instead the approach of critique – which would soon become, by inner coherence, a communist critique – finally made it possible to grasp the relationship with the adversary.
How difficult it is to learn the critical function of knowledge! In other words to practise knowledge like a scalpel that cuts into being, and distinguishes and fixes things, and gives them different names, often inimical. Like calling on the sun to stop. As an ability to take sides, to remove oneself from the ecstasy of the self as a subject, from the indifference of nonproblematised foundations, from the complacency of assumed certainties. When truth becomes a victory over an adversary, only then does it have the meaning of a truth. Only separation and antagonism bring out truth. It is for this reason, David, that I say: prehistory had come to an end. From Jericho there extends the Promised Land. This world into which I was now inserting myself with a new intelligence was no longer a world made of shadows – I was beginning to recognise certain shapes, material logics, irreversible contradictions and oppositions. The years of vagabondage were coming to an end.
The critique of the philosophical universe in which I had previously lived became radical: I saw the general humanism on which I had built my youthful philosophical illusion enter into crisis along two lines – Husserlian asceticism and Wittgensteinian mysticism – the one opposed to the other, but the two concomitant in their outcomes. This age into which the force of capitalist development had placed us was an age of crisis. An open dialectic, of which we were the subjects, presented itself now. Any abstract compensation for the totality that was coming undone was impossible. Building and dismantling the dialectical schema was no longer a literary exercise but was becoming a hands-on mode of liberating the world. I had finally arrived at the base – and neither above nor next to the Christ triumphant – in that huge Last Judgement. The arrogance of ideology no longer had any place. Both asceticism and mysticism were now following lines subordinated to the scission of being – to its loss of human signification. Husserl and Wittgenstein were a delusion: teleology and mystical Jetzt became equivalent. A world that was not making sense. No polytheism – capable, by polite ideological convention, of comforting and removing desperation – could compensate for the loss of human signification; no, I rejected any Plädoyer für aufgeklärte Polymythie [plea for an enlightened polymythy] that sought to recreate illusion, and I saw no illuminating force in it. The real, the real, this is the cry of the truth seekers who, after a long homeward journey, stand on the shores of their native land.
The loss of the human meaning of the world is the system of exploitation. Hence it is on this that intelligence needs to be sharpened – on the splitting of the world, on the separateness that generates crisis. The solution can only be practical. But the practice is just as split as the theoretical conception of being: in the world of practice, asceticism is matched by the emptiness of critical rationalism, of reformism; and mysticism is matched by the foolish vitality of decisionism, of conceptions of the autonomy of the political. In neither case does humanism hold. The refounding of revolutionary thought can only emerge from between this Scylla and Charybdis – in other words from beyond humanism. As an act of recognition of real determinations and of a practice of mass transformation – and as a submission of ourselves to this practice and to its laws. The communist critique, coupled with the hope of a humanism that sees itself not as foundation but as horizon, poses a subject that is capable of passing through all negativity and can discriminate and overturn all transcendence of being – and this is a practical operation, a theoretical practice exercised by a collective subject. I want to be a political activist, and my theory can only be communist practice. In those same years Louis Althusser, for his part, was forcing French philosophical thought to a similar horizon, albeit within a different cocktail of theoretical elements: I discussed this with him many years later. He told me that he had a similar sense of urgency. The theoretical conjuncture and the political conjuncture were destroying any possibility of moving within a phenomenology of simple consciousness and imposed a coupure that involved work of critique within real being, which meant in turn that theoretical work became productive work. Pour Marx.
With that I now reclaim for my generation here in Italy the merit and the good fortune of having been, with an inevitable originality of approach, the first European generation – in our arrival at maturity and in our manner of building. And, compared with the operating conditions of our peers elsewhere in Europe, we had the advantage of being immersed in an effectual practice. While we did not actually draw anything from the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and from its Italian ideological archaeology, it is to this party that we owed the possibility of the immediate relationship between theory and practice that characterised the – ineradicable – historical presence of our generation. It was for this reason that the Italian 1968 would be so different – because we, the European generation, had enjoyed that formidable Introit into the life of the masses that had been the PCI.
But now let us return to ourselves, cher David. And I mean to that total shift of discourse made possible at the time by contact with German philosophy. Those repeated journeys of mine over the Brenner started from a Paduan philosophical institute – the Institute of the Philosophy of Law – into which I had fortunately and fortuitously enrolled a few years earlier. I wasn’t earning a penny but, ahead of the times, I had long since acquired a sleeping bag and a restlessness that I made use of, and I was living a healthy, mobile and multifaceted life of Zen simplicity. The institute had an extraordinarily rich library – Ravà, Capograssi, Bobbio, Opocher and Caiani had all contributed to it over the years, and they had built a place of study that was a rarity in Italy. Here, in the most total solitude, I could prepare my journeys. And each time I moved, my thought was that I would make a small contribution to the destruction of the academic vices that still penetrated that little backwater. The cynicism, the cliques, the blind conservatism, the social climbing, the general ignorance of a profession that had been exclusive until that point – the academy of the barons – a parasitic mode of existence: I saw with increasing anger how all this was attaching itself to and feeding on the sense of the sanctity of the institutions and of the law, holy in their formalism, beyond the doors of the seminary of philosophy – which is precisely where law institutes began. What a great reactionary mélange, what an incredible waxworks that Faculty of Jurisprudence was! There you learned how to identify and classify every species and subspecies of the fauna of ‘the right’ – the pure reactionary and the good-natured conservative, the fascist and the Catholic centrist, the royalist and the sex maniac, the fascist terrorist and the special branch police officer, the former partisan and the repentant communist, the reformist snob (but not too much) and the opportunist, the Nazi and the mystic, the Spaniard and the South African . . . All this in an atmosphere of great decorum. So that was the environment in which I, the cold entomologist, was spending my days. With a heavy irony: today I would be accused of having been an infiltrator. It’s true – my clandestinity was total. I worked with discipline and earned academic qualifications with ease. But my really solitary adventure was happening on the other side of the Brenner Pass. I made my escape. Every couple of months I left, and every couple of months I returned.
Towards the end of this period of scholarly nomadism, in 1959, I happened to meet a wonderful person in Tübingen. This was Jürgen, formerly professor of theology and now a sociologist. They were blooming then, in the existential void of the Cold War, of the Schuldfrage [problem of guilt], of the internal migration, of the restoration – these exceptional Germans, new people who seemed to come from some ancient time. Big, solidly built, brown hair, blue eyes. Many years later Peter Brückner struck me as being made of that same stuff. I met Jürgen at an Ernst Bloch seminar. He had the air of a southerner, a Mediterranean Norman. We talked for a long time as we strolled beneath the willows of the Neckar. He was active in the antinuclear movement. For him Hiroshima was, rightly, a metaphysical sign. With him I was able to take a cool look at the various things that had happened to me. The scattered bits of my experience began to fit together. Jürgen explained to me the continuity between the communist utopia and the analysis of the everyday – developing the ethical discourse and its evangelical significance directly into a practical definition of anticapitalist insurgency. He believed strongly that war, destruction and fascism were inherent in the mode of production founded on capital and that, in consequence, this was not just a neutral economic essence; because of the effects it produced, it was also an ethical essence. German self-criticism regarding Nazism, the subtle analyses of Neumann, Kirchheimer and Gurland, recovered the historical density of class hatred. So why should one not personify the evil? Why not bring back critical reason to ethical reason? In short, capitalism is evil. On the other hand, why can the communist utopia not be real – a concrete project, subject to and practised in the story of everyday life? Why do we not recognise in this huge potential of alternative constitution the best quality of our humanity? For Jürgen, who came from East Germany, communist practice had no exemplary representations, in either the East or the West. Germany, the one single Germany, which included all the Germans, would sooner or later find itself again in the common struggle against oppression. Jokingly he added that Marx, in foreseeing the revolution in Germany, would never have guessed what history had in store for him – ‘the revolution in the two Germanys’. We both read the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, the East Berlin philosophical journal, and we joked about its obscene bureaucratic rigour; and from West Germany we read the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie, observing its vacuousness and its commodified problematics. But the real dialogue had shifted entirely to the concrete utopia, or rather to the translation of the concrete utopia into a practice of militant life. Jürgen died a couple of years later, as a result of a fall in the mountains. Where would you be today, my old friend – in Stammheim Prison or in the Teutonic forest battles over Startbahn-West? I am grateful for your appearance in the world, chosen spirit! But Jürgen went further, much further, in his positive critique of Marxism. Critique, in his view, could become revolutionary practice only depending on how much it could be extended, with full application, over the fabric of alienated being. Critique could and should pass through all the veins of totality – of the negative totality of power and of the positive totality of the social. Jürgen explained the Twentieth Congress through a materialistic analytic of the productive society of socialism. The capitalist transition in which we found ourselves, in both the East and the West, was marked by a productive reconstruction of the whole of being, of the extension of exploitation to the sectors of reproduction – and thus by the appearance of new structural dimensions of conflict in this transition. (The books of Kosik and Kołakowski were circulating widely at that time.) It was on the basis of this transformation that Stalinism collapsed. Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956. In the western world the crisis was pressing, and it was all the more mature as the relations of production were more advanced, and more evident in its subjective aspects. Not only the critique of political economy, but also a critique of the sociology of society as a whole was thus necessary to permit us to grasp the human totality of the antagonistic subject. Horkheimer had been saying this since 1933: ‘the misery of the present is intrinsic to the social structure. Therefore the theory of society constitutes the actual content of today’s materialism.’3 Not only: so fort [onwards]! Marx had to be conjugated with Heidegger. At this level of intensity and quality, thought reaches the real – and, insofar as it does, it makes possible the exercise of revolutionary transformation. And it guarantees ethical action.
(Here I had difficulty following the development of the argument. In this plunge into being, I found it hard to understand how a desperate realism could become such an acute cognitive force. And the reversal and destruction of any possible mythical or metaphysical horizon. That damnable second-hand Platonism that, having read the Symposium, we carried around with us from a young age – that bright-eyed philosophising – let us sweep it away: the way of thinking of the masters, the way of thinking of the temple. I want to join my seed with that of the earth – even if this were the realm of aridity. But it is not.)
The methodological discipline of Jürgen’s discourse was linear – the centre of the analysis consisted of a critique of all objectivist and mechanicist deformations of the revolutionary method. But, unlike in Korsch, Lukács and the polemic of 1920s’ western Marxism, here the critique was directed towards a dynamic unification of the self-understanding of science and the orientation of praxis: the criterion of truth was not transcendent, external, party-based; it could no longer be that. Subjectivity was an element inseparable from science. That statement was true for theoretical practice at both the individual and the collective level: Adorno – ‘in such a construction, the working class returns to itself.’ Now the elementary words of the communist struggle all reappeared in front of me, but freed from shreds of abstraction or sentimentality. Now they no longer represented only concepts, but desires or things. They did not contain just a vague protest, but the basic – material – reason for the transformation. The critical potency became materialistic potency: we talked about things, about person a and person b, about classes, poverty, hunger, exploitation and war. And then: no more war, no more poverty, no more death. No more masters – all of us together, we can be masters of ourselves. This world is developing towards an exasperation about command and death. Necessarily. And, equally necessarily, that logic has to be broken. Violence is internal to society, and thus to science. The mechanism can be blocked, and therefore the possibility of critique asserted, only through collective initiative. This collective task is determinate: Bruch mit der herrschenden technologischen Rationalität [‘a break with the dominant technological rationality’]. The dominant technology is powerful and destructive – impossible to think of it as neutral, it is the bosses’ means of conducting their never-ending war on the working day. Rationality is the word they use for this kind of mechanism. In this sense, the break occurs and grows as an element that is ethical, autonomous and free. It applies, inasmuch as it is an autonomous breaking, also in the field of development, because development, far from being constrained within the pure expansion of its technical base (and therefore far from being defined in terms of neutrality and indifference), can be qualified by and refounded on proletarian needs. The servant does not need dialectics in order to rid himself of the master. The dialectic of servitude can and must transform itself into a separate logic of proletarian revolution. So enough of the dialectical, of that figure of thought that always reproduces negativity and transcendence and their impotent pacification. It reproduces religion – and all religions, even those resolved into sectarian thought, affirm dialectics, and in that way they sanctify exploitation and negate the ethical. Except for Judaism, the Aryan Jürgen added. On the other hand, when we have constructed within ourselves the political as ethics, we can reproduce the desire for liberation in the mass subjects and develop against capital their separate reality and their solidarity. Historical materialism is a methodology of liberation.
Jürgen joked: zum Bauernkrieg! Let’s go to the Peasants’ War! No, it was not this, really not. But we had to deal with that sense of radical separation in order to render visible the object of our hatred and the subject of our love. The ontological implantation of negative thinking, which articulated the rigour of the techniques of formal and systematic inquiry of the new (but already experienced) Frankfurt School of sociology; the political passion of humanism and antifascism; and, finally, a radical critique of capitalist alienation – all these allowed us to situate ourselves appropriately in relation to our present tasks. They were tasks of militancy, and at the same time tasks related to the effective determination of theoretical analysis. The criticisms renewed later, after 1968 (and still today) – against the one-sidedness and abstract radicalism of the Frankfurt School and of the militant sociology that was beginning to become a weapon of the youth movement in those years (Habermas: the Frankfurt School did not give normative substance to the critique of instrumental reason! Bon, cher David, so it was he who gave it? A fine hypocrite!) – those critiques, then, do not take into account that those were hard times when it was difficult to build an alternative horizon – in a European society in which the restoration was in full swing.
So, David, it was at this point that prehistory came to an end for me. Obviously I continued to work around philosophical arguments in the following years, but without believing in them much – in the sense that I’d already built myself a solid niche. And from this I settled down to a work of empirical analysis, to a commitment to political activism. Skepsis als Endlichkeit: translation of critical behaviour into finiteness. Later on, the revival of philosophical discourse, for me, represented a return to life’s restlessness – and, why not admit it, to certain political defeats suffered on the ground made up of the philosophical positions that I was now taking. But we shall speak more of this later. What I feel right now is the satisfaction of those years. Not a presumptuous attitude, not some supposedly admirable possession of truth, but a relatively secure arrival at a critical method. And at its ontological basis of separation (which my memories of Souzy confirmed, and where I took comfort in the tradition of thinking of the division – the basis of testimony and conquest: the great eternal Israel!). It was not a critical method that developed in leisurely fashion, down known routes and pathways, nor was it neutral knowledge – but rather a capacity for concrete analyses and for mobilising them into antagonism. It was a thinking of tendency – where the link between subjectivity and objectivity was recycled within the risky dynamics of relations of power. The rule of the class struggle, the method of overturning and of the antagonistic explanation of all events, and an ability to analyse in parallel two logics, that of capital and that of class – these were the tools that I had won for myself.
I was happy with all this. I was looking ahead, with a certain timidity; at the same time I was looking back in amazement and could not understand how I had managed to extricate myself from so many false roads and such powerful temptations, to reach the serenity of performing a job that needed to be done. Without having paid too high a price in terms of life difficulties – even with a certain fidelity to myself and my world. I was coming closer to Marxism – I did not feel that I was betraying other beliefs. I had been a communist from way back. Could Marxism be capable of organising communist hope in an appropriate manner? The renewal of the Frankfurt School, which seemed to me so strong and positive, was successfully grafted onto a radical ethical dimension; and this led to a rediscovery of the Jewish origins of the separation, the true meaning of prophetism, on this road – twisting and scary, but emancipatory – that humanity travelled. Meanwhile I read and reread the authors of that silver German age – everything I could get my hands on, starting with the Hegelians and going back through the century. The historical disaster of that culture did not spoil its very pure capacity of being the conscience of the world. And meanwhile, like a sailor returning from a long and happy journey and seeing the coastline of his native land – and, nostalgically, his mind goes back to the ports he has visited, the cities he has seen, and the adventures he has experienced – I was happy to be returning but worried about the changes I would find, possibly hostile, and certainly about new jobs waiting to be done; this was how I was – nervous about my return. Was my period of travels and the emotions of theory over? Was I finally a full-fledged communist political militant? Yes, certainly. Now the important thing was being able to be poor – poor as an heir to the great disaster of European culture and of its crisis, poor in order to be able to talk to workers about communist hope. However, these edifying thoughts did not trouble me much, because there was always at hand some ironic line of my old friend Bertolt Brecht – my daily reading at that time – to correct them with a dose of realism and to steer me clear of the pathetic and passivity. Goodbye to my childhood friends, goodbye Souzy, master of my apprenticeship, goodbye Jürgen, my brother in research.
Goodnight, David. Do you remember our shared reading of Gershom Scholem, how excited we were about the antinomic ferments of the Kabbala, and how we concluded that Judaism is neither dialectics nor religion? Rather it is a religious exception, because it is an exclusion of dialectics. The element of separation, as universal potentiality, reaches us and traverses contemporaneity through Judaism. Marx’s ‘Jewish question’ cannot be read simply as the attribution of alienation to a historical subject – but also, and above all, as a way of understanding how, within capitalist development, this separation can transfigure itself and become a foundational element of theoretical intelligence and of practical transformation. The Nazis had seen in the Jew the communist and the revolutionary worker; today Israeli fascists see and hate and kill the Jew in the form of the Palestinian and his wife and children; we could see in the Jewish separation the sacred history of the proletariat. Here, on these trips into German things, the antagonist logic of the Kabbala had revealed itself to me. But Zohar’s dream of liberation was also urgent and pressing, and it was possible. I send a hug. I’ll write soon . . .